Liberal Preferences

Chris Dillow, building on a post by David Allen Green, notes that UK politics is in crisis because "destabilizing forces have strengthened and stabilizing ones have weakened." What he means by this is that the tendency to rein in the extremes is no longer instinctive among the main parties (obviously stamping on herbivorous lefties is another matter). He gives a good example in the relative treatment of Enoch Powell after his Rivers of Blood speech (sacked by party leader Ted Heath) and Robert Jenrick after thoughtlessly hobnobbing with Fascist activists (not a hint of disciplinary action from Kemi Badenoch). Instead of negative feedback, we get positive feedback as bigotry is mainstreamed, urban myths are cast as legitimate concerns, and someone who incited racial hatred and advocated burning people to death is hailed as a political prisoner. Elsewhere, economic illiteracy is promoted by both politicians and the media because they believe the electorate is ignorant and can only be appealed to through crass simplifications such as the nation's "maxed-out credit card".

As Chris explains, "All I'm doing here is spelling out a few mechanisms in support of David Allen Green's recent attack on the complacent idea that 'unpleasant situations will resolve themselves' and that balance will be restored. For this to happen, there must be negative, stabilizing, feedback mechanisms. But our political-media class has weakened these, preferring to pander to racism. I'm not surprised that so many in this class choose barbarism over socialism. What is surprising is that they choose barbarism even over liberal democracy." So why do they make that latter choice? One place to seek an answer is the house journal of British liberalism, The Guardian. I would argue that its most typical columnist is John Harris, who can be characterised as a liberal pessimist in that he regularly chides "progressives" for not doing enough to resist racism or improve public services, but whose only solution is vapid symbolism and otherwise cultivating your garden. There are others who are more optimistic (Polly Toynbee) and more pessimistic (Rafael Behr), but Harris is representative because he tends to sway between those poles, like a depressed ruminant who spots a buttercup.

He certainly wasn't an advocate of Labour's shift to a more genuinely progressive politics under Jeremy Corbyn, though his attempts to parse the upswell of enthusiasm that gave rise to it between 2015 and 2019 are interesting precisely because of his need to welcome that progressive intent while dismissing the left as a viable vehicle for it. Thus during the leadership contest in 2015 he welcomed that Corbyn offered clarity, but by the time the 2017 general election came into view, he was dismissing a Corbyn-led Labour Party as deeply irrelevant. Immediately after the unexpectedly positive result for Labour, Corbyn was apparently chiming with the times. By 2019 Harris was fully on board with the hunt for antisemites, insisting that Labour's only hope was to ditch its fringe views and toxic culture, and even adopt his favoured panacea of localism for good measure (nothing fringe about that). Viewed rapidly like a flip book, what we see is a liberal, keen to avoid the charge of being an out-of-touch curmudgeon, frightened by the prospect of a government promising mild social democracy.

In his latest contribution to the discourse, Harris claims that while the far-right protests outside hotels housing asylum-seekers have been damp squibs, progressive forces are "so dumbfounded and confused by what is happening that they seem almost completely unable to respond". What he fails to acknowledge is that the left is not silent, it is merely marginalised by the media (the larger counter-demonstrations have been barely reported, and when they do appear in the Guardian it's as likely to be an opportunity for tone-policing). The real culprit here is the Labour government, which has provided rhetorical cover for street-level racism while simultaneously curtailing the rights of protest by anti-racists. And it is the media that explains how protests with minimal support on the street beyond the old Fascist right can dominate politics. Indeed, if you're looking for a "new right" you should start with the increasing derangement of newspaper columnists like Allison Pearson and Melanie Phillips, not with the latest neo-Nazi groupuscule to emerge from under a rock.

Harris's prescription in the face of an increasingly Fascist press, and a complacently centrist TV insisting on impartiality between truth and lies, is nostalgia, and specifically the symbolic power of Rock Against Racism. What he doesn't appreciate is that RAR and the Anti-Nazi League reflected a wider revolt against the political establishment in the late-70s and early-80s that notably roiled the Labour Party. What Harris wants is the free concerts, not Tony Benn bidding for the Deputy Leadership or Ken Livingstone defying the Thatcher government. His claim that "The prominence of Palestine flags at this year’s festivals proves that music’s radical edges have not been completely blunted" is an admission that he sees this radicalism (of the music note, not the people) as purely symbolic, otherwise he might wonder whether there was any connection between opposing genocidal racism abroad and defending migrants at home.

Chris Dillow's model of stablisation through negative feedback depends on authority. When Ted Heath sacked Enoch Powell he not only had the authority of his position as Conservative Party Leader, he was also the representative of an establishment that still commanded popular respect, despite the downward trend since the Suez crisis, not least because of its eventual resistance to Nazism (Heath himself had opposed appeasement in the 1930s). The establishment has lost a lot more respect since the 1980s, due to the secular failure of its preferred economic policies, the decay of the public realm, and because of specific scandals of trust, from Iraq to MPs' expenses. As the establishment's man, Keir Starmer has clearly failed in his goal of restoring the authority and gravitas of government after a decade and a half of disastrous Tory rule. Yet his political strategy, to occupy the centre-right of politics and marginalise both the far-right and the left, remains unchanged, largely because the Conservative Party has fallen apart in the face of Reform's rise, leaving the ground clear to Labour. He has the field, but the battle may already be lost.

Starmer's problem is that his centre-right offer acts as positive feedback to Reform, which encourages right-leaning voters to go for the full-fat version, while it alienates both centrists and soi disant progressives like John Harris because it fails to reflect their self-image as rational and virtuous. Who can provide the negative feedback to arrest the rightward drift of politics in such an environment? Harris may posture about that drift, but he has played his own part in it. Consider this classic of the legitimate concerns genre from a couple of weeks ago: "Just to be clear, the grim scenes that have materialised at those hotels are the signs not just of far-right activism and provocation, but broken policy. No one should underestimate how much the grooming gangs scandal has given many people a deep fear about the safety of women and girls, not least in places that have long felt ignored and neglected". The roots of the grooming scandal lay in the habitual contempt shown by the police and social services to working-class girls, not in the shortcomings of asylum policy.

The problem then is that liberals are not defending liberal democracy and are happy to accept the right's framing of social ills. One way of explaining this is to note that centrists, the largest component of the British politico-media class, aren't actually liberals, neither in the broader sense of defenders of civil liberties against authoritarianism, nor in the narrower sense of advocates of free markets (their's is a capitalism of managed markets and corporate graft). That broader sense is still prevalent in British society, but it has no real political articulation at present, and its more vigorous proponents regularly find themselves marginalised as extremists by the media and even criminalised by the state. At this point we have to ask if the UK is actually a liberal democracy in any meaningful sense. The classic definitions of the term usually focus on the mechanics: fair elections, an independent judiciary, the separation of powers etc. But the acid test is arguably equal protection under the law. This is, for example, why Israel cannot be considered a liberal democracy. 

In the UK we have not gone so far as to pass a basic law that guarantees superior rights for certain groups, and thus inferior rights for others, but that may well be on the cards should Reform get into government and withdraw us from the European Convention on Human Rights (both the government and media are already assessing Farage's mass-deportation promise in terms of achieavability rather than morality or civil rights). But this won't be a sudden lurch away from liberal democracy. The current government's unwillingness to secure the rights of trans people, and its proscription of Palestine Action on the flimsiest of pretexts, are clear indicators of the direction of travel. And before that, we can see a common thread of contempt for those who resist the politico-media consensus running backwards through the Labour antisemitism nonsense, via Brexit and the dismissal of the Iraq War protests, all the way to Thatcherism. British centrists chose barbarism over liberal democracy a long time ago.

A Taxing Issue

The United Kingdom is richer today than it has ever been, both in the material sense of stuff (the conversion of natural resources into useful things) and in the accounting sense of the ratio of measurable wealth to GDP. It is estimated that household wealth is now six times GDP, having risen from four times before the millennium. There has been a clear trend since 1980 of rising household wealth, to a large extent property and to a lesser extent financial assets (shares, savings etc). This rise has mainly been passive - i.e. the result of rising property and asset prices rather than any increase in direct productivity or trade. Average household density is actually in decline. Together with rising rents and mortgage costs, this means that "housing services" now cost much more, even allowing for inflation. Meanwhile, houses and flats are exportable only in the sense that a foreigner can buy one, but this does not lead to the production of more houses over-and-above domestic demand, because those properties are typically recirculated into the rental market. 

It is generally accepted among economists that we should tax wealth more than income, essentially because the one is potentially inactive (if not invested in productive use) while the other is invariably active (you must be producing value to command a wage). In other words, wealth may be a wasted opportunity and tax is a way of incentivising its productive use. The problem arises because wealth is also a way of building financial reserves for future use, whether in the form of anticipated capital projects or a fund for future expenditure. This is why we give tax-breaks for certain types of saving as well as for investment. The problem that bedevils the discussion of the taxation of property is the extent to which it represents a simple store of value, like gold, versus a savings account. In other words, is your house (in whole or in part) a luxury good or is it your pension? 

The foundation of popular neoliberalism has been the financialisation of both domestic property and precautionary savings. The first has meant treating your home as an investment in the hope of rising property values, which has inexorably led to a political consensus that has constrained housebuilding while loudly claiming to be in favour of more homes. The second has meant excising the role of the state in providing collective insurance, instead relying on the individual negotiating with impersonal markets, which at the margin leads to an appetite for high-risk/high-reward shortcuts such as crypto. The two intersect in the idea that your house - or your other house if you're a buy-to-let landlord - is also your pension, though one of the things declining household density tells us is that many older couples, notably those who secured defined benefits pensions before the shutters came down in the 1990s, are in no hurry to liquidate their prime asset and downsize.

Despite this massive increase in the nation's wealth, we are repeatedly told that the current Chancellor of the Exchequer is "desperate to find money". Because of the government's promise not to increase income tax (perhaps the only promise it will keep over the life of the parliament), attention has turned to the taxation of wealth, first through inheritance and now through property. The candidate mechanisms being discussed include the replacement of Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) with an annual levy proportionate to value and the extension of capital gains tax (CGT) to the sale of higher value properties. Inevitably, there is also talk of finally fixing council tax, whether by folding it into the annual levy or simply revaluing the existing property bands to address the current inequities. Many of these ideas have emerged from the centre-right of the political spectrum where there is clearly anxiety that without reform more radical measures may become popular (a land value tax, equalising CGT with income tax etc). But unpicking the Thatcherite dispensation takes delicacy, because of the intersection of property and savings.

Tim Leunig of the think-tank Onward is one of the leading lights of this tendency, proposing a "horizontal split" between local and central government tax receipts. The former would be funded by a local tax based on property values up to a maximum of £500,000 - i.e. a house worth £1 million would be assessed for tax as £0.5 million. Owners (not residents) of properties over that value would additionally pay a national annual levy based on the most recent sale price, the receipts of which would go to central government. This would be immediately advantageous to owners of high-value properties in terms of a lower local tax. In theory, that gain is more that wiped out by the national tax, but that depends on when the property was last sold, leading Leunig to propose a further supplement to balance the tax burden in the case of properties not sold (e.g. repeatedly inherited). At this point it becomes obvious that there are too many potential loopholes, and too much reliance on adjustment by HMRC, which creates opportunities for the tax advisors of the wealthy to exploit.

Leaving aside its chances of adoption, the notable feature of Leunig's scheme is its crude division of society by wealth into two classes. His attempt to justify this by splitting the receipts between local and central government is hardly convincing given that the latter still has to fund the former through grants: no local authority is wholly self-financing. The Thatcherite dream of full accountability to local taxpayers, which drove the Poll Tax, was always in tension with the desire to emasculate ideologically hostile councils through Whitehall diktat. The fundamental problem for our society remains the anticipated decline of income tax receipts as a share of government revenue due to demographic change: more elderly and fewer working-age people in the population. The secular growth in wealth, and the potential to tax it, offers the only real solution to address this trend as further taxes on consumption (e.g. VAT, fuel duty etc.) would be inflationary and hugely unpopular. Worrying about the division of receipts between local and central government is a distraction.

Others have taken a more overtly divisive tack. For example, Phillip Inman in the Guardian sees it in generational terms as the boomers versus the rest. That many boomers are not wealthy, while some millennials are (often due to inheritance), does not lead him to qualify the explicit threat: "If boomers cannot bring themselves to act collectively and patriotically for the greater good, as seems unlikely for many reasons, then it will be legitimate for the government to pursue their lottery winnings with higher property and pension taxes." This is unhelpful because it personalises the issue of wealth ("lottery winners"), though it should be said that Inman's critics fall into the same trap in talking about virtue. The reality is that boomers were simply those in residence when the financialisation of property and pensions took off: some benefited, some didn't. That unearned wealth will now pass down the generations. To address that inequity means addressing the wealth, not blaming the individual.

Wealth can be divided into two classes: land and money. The former is easy to tax because it is immobile and relatively straightforward to value. The latter takes two forms: accumulated money (e.g. a bank deposit) and transacted money (e.g. a payment or a receipt). Accumulated money is difficult to tax because it can be hidden or offshored. Transacted money is relatively easy to tax at the point of the transaction, hence our reliance on VAT, PAYE, CGT, SDLT etc. The problem with this is not the levying of tax but the rates chosen. For example, we levy higher rates on earned income (income tax) than we do on unearned income (CGT or dividends). The rationale for this differential is to avoid discouraging transactions, but that makes little sense in the real world. The reason we don't put VAT on food is not because we think doing so would lead to everyone dieting. Likewise, investors who rely on capital gains to provide an income aren't going to sell up and take jobs instead. After all, who would they sell to?

The obvious solutions to the Chancellor's problem are a land value tax (LVT) and the extension of income tax to all unearned income, e.g. capital gains, dividends and inheritance. The first would give us a more efficient tax system: receipts would be predictable (SDLT is not); avoidance minimal (assuming the government doesn't grant exemptions); and the tax itself progressive (on the reasonable assumption that there is a correlation between land ownership and wealth). The second would also have the advantage of simplicity; would discourage avoidance (e.g. individuals masquerading as a company to treat wages as a dividend); and would also be progressive (the people who make capital gains and earn dividends tend to be wealthier). Neither has any realistic chance of being adopted, precisely because they would shift more of the burden of tax onto the truly wealthy. The most realistic outcome at present remains a revaluation of council tax as this would spread the pain across most of society. We remain trapped in Thatcher's legacy, despite the obvious failures of popular neoliberalism.

Conservative Pessimism

In last Monday's Guardian you could read both John Harris describing his dismay at the right's "ballooning narrative about complete social breakdown" and Nesrine Malik noting that the call for the deportation of immigrants has become mainstream. Harris inevitably felt the need to drag in the left as a pointless comparison: "Just as people on the left have been predicting for at least 150 years that capitalism is about to chaotically implode under the weight of its own contradictions, so some of the loudest voices on the post-Brexit right have come up with their own version of a similarly historic meltdown: a vision of the immediate future in which rampant wokery, crime, failed immigration policy, weak policing and general establishment decay and corruption will lead inexorably to what Nigel Farage calls 'societal collapse'." Leaving aside the crude strawman, not to mention the plentiful evidence that capitalism is trashing the planet, the point to note here is Harris's belief that this is a new development on the right, with the none-too subtle hint that the left remains trapped in the past so we shouldn't look for any answers there.

Similarly, the normally acute Malik falls into the trap of assuming that the calls for mass deportation are novel. She is correct that this language has been amplified by politicians in recent years, notably by Keir Starmer, but she is mistaken in claiming that "the last time a member of a political party even hinted at any sort of deportation policy was in the late 00s, when British National party leader Nick Griffin ... stated that he would 'encourage' voluntary repatriation of legal migrants and 'those of foreign descent to return to their lands of ethnic origin'." There been plenty of hints in the interevening period. After all, what do you imagine most people think when they hear the phrase "one in, one out"? And repatriation was never limited to the neo-Nazis, as Enoch Powell's many supporters proved. In fact, both ideas - that society is coming apart at the seams and that immigrants should be "sent back" - have been common among Tories since the 1960s when the Monday Club was founded. The views may not have been considered respectable by many Conservative grandees, but they were common among the rank and file. Margaret Thatcher's victory in 1979 owed much to both: the belief that the country was falling apart during the "Winter of Discontent" and the perception that immigration left many people feeling, as she put it, "swamped".

Going further back, in 1945 Winston Churchill infamously predicted that a Labour victory under Clement Attlee would lead to the creation of a British Gestapo. This wasn't a lunatic exaggeration fuelled by too much champagne but simply the continuation of pre-war practice. Between 1919 and 1924 the Conservative Party defined itself primarily around the anti-Bolshevik "Red Scare", culminating in the notorious Zinoviev letter, a forgery published by the Daily Mail to (successfully) damage Labour's chances in the general election. The mainstream right have always been hysterical when out of power, or facing that prospect, and the form this takes is invariably hyperbolic warnings about threats to our way of life emanating from a coalition of foreigners, traitors and idiot do-gooders. In its contemporary guise, Bolsheviks and sandal-wearing vegetarians have been replaced by rapacious asylum-seekers and trans rights activists. There's nothing novel in anything that either Nigel Farage or Robert Jenrick has said lately, though there is an important difference in their manner of delivery.

Pessimism is the natural tenor of conservative thought. The roots of the right's philosophy lie in the Hobbesian vision of a war of all against all, not in Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott's eulogisation of the small platoons and the familiar. Burke was actually a stinging critic of the Ancien Regime, along with Joseph de Maistre, precisely because he feared it lacked the rectitude and courage to defeat revolution from below. It is fear that is central to conservatism, and that fear routinely manifests as a belief that the country is going to the dogs and that we are being invaded by grasping foreigners. In this context it's worth noting that revolution from above, in the sense of the elite restoration of tradition in the face of such threats, is not only countenanced but seen as exemplary: hence the eulogisation of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which apparently saved the country from absolute monarchy, Catholicism and foreign fashions. 

In contrast, the common thread that runs through the political philosophy of the broad left, from incremental liberals to ecstatic insurrectionaries, is optimism: the belief that things can get better and that politics can effect change. Even John Harris's crude caricature of the Marxist left gets this right: the certainty that there will be another crisis and thus another chance for progress. One way of thinking about Labour's current troubles is that despite expelling most of the left, the PLP remains divided between the optimists - e.g. Blairites insisting that AI will solve all our problems - and the pessimists - the authoritarians insisting that if we don't stamp down hard on little old ladies with cardboard signs Vladimir Putin will be strolling up the Mall tomorrow. Starmer is clearly in the latter camp. His fundamental mistake is the failure to understand that the "conservative" voters he is trying to attract are motivated by optimism as much as pessimism, hence the talk of hard choices and the need for crackdowns has failed to win them over.

Michael Oakeshott's famous quote reflects the instinctive pessimism of the Tory elite: "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." But success in democratic politics requires a mix of optimism and pessimism. Since 2016, voters in Britain have, perhaps paradoxically, tended towards optimism: displaying an appetite for the unknown and untried that led first to Jeremy Corbyn's ascent and then to Boris Johnson's victory in 2019. While Nigel Farage may currently lay on the horror stories of national decline with a trowel, it is his cheerful optimism that garners support for the mystery that is Reform, and it is Starmer's ingrained pessimism that means Labour's hopes of attracting conservative voters, or even retaining left-leaning ones, will likely continue to be frustrated.

The Zone of Uninterest

Corey Robin recently published a post about how opinions on Israel are rapidly changing among Jews. It is heavily ironised, and stands at the intersection of the literary traditions of awakening conscience and the Jewish-American experience (his own style owes not a little to Philip Roth), but the essential point I'd like to focus on is his recognition of that rapidity: the sense that there has been a sea-change in opinion and understanding. He quotes a number of statements by prominent Jews, introducing them as follows: "I’m posting these statements here just to give you a sense of how quickly opinion is changing. And it’s not Israel-haters and antisemites or self-hating Jews who are voicing the alarm. Most of these individuals below continue to identify as Zionists, as liberal Zionists, and of those who no longer identify as Zionist, they come by their positions honestly, as I hope you will see."

What changed in recent weeks was the incontrovertible evidence that the Israeli government is engaged in a deliberate policy of starvation, with some members of the cabinet openly advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, an intent reinforced by Benjamin Netanyahu's current proposal for the IDF to occupy the entire territory for an indeterminate period of time. What changed was the IDF murdering Palestinians queuing for food in what can only be described as a killing field. The decision of a number of Western countries to signal their intent to recognise a Palestinian state next month, along with the long-overdue and still tentative steps towards an arms embargo by the likes of Germany, have been symptomatic of this wider sea-change, rather than contributory factors. They are evidence of the realisation of governments that have willingly supported Israel that they are way out of line with their own electorates, and are increasingly out of line with liberal Jewish opinion globally.

Many of the people cited by Robin discuss the issue in terms of crossing a line: that Israel has gone too far, and risks losing its soul in the process. Perhaps the most interesting citation is of Avrum Burg, a former interim President of Israel and Leader of the Knesset who is prepared, at least rhetorically, to address the more existential issue - essentially the entire history of the state since 1948 - but who frames this in terms of Israeli/Jewish loss: "Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since….The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist."

There is a well-worn trope in the literary treatment of Nazism and the Holocaust of the cultured German officer listening to Schubert after a hard day's work overseeing the gas ovens. Beyond the inherent class bias in this image, which assumes the ordinary German soldier was an unthinking brute in comparison, there is this idea of loss: how could a culture that produced Schubert lead to the Final Solution? Where did Germany's soul go? The problem with the "crossing a line" framing is that it suggests a step back could be taken across that same line, like the German officer coming to his senses as he listens to Erlkönig, feeling pity for his victims and understanding that he is the evil-doer. But that is obviously absurd. While some Germans bravely resisted the Nazis, most did not, and those officers in the camps were selected precisely because they were true-believers who would feel neither shame nor guilt. 

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt (another writer Robin has long engaged with) famously wrote of "the banality of evil". The book caused a furore (and continues to divide historians) both because it described Eichman primarily as a careerist rather than a fervid antisemite, and because it highlighted the complicity of some Jews in the facilitation of the Holocaust. The first charge is problematic because it suggests Eichmann's behaviour was the result of incentives, rather than any commitment on his part over-and-above career advancement. At the close of Jonathan Glazer's 2023 film The Zone of Interest we see the Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss retching as he descends the stairs of a deserted palace into the darkness. Is this his conscience rebelling? In reality Höss claimed to have realised the enormity of his crimes only days before his execution. Prior to that, his attitude when challenged was described as "apathetic" and having "a lack of empathy". I can't be the only one who saw a parallel between the film's scenes of mundane looting and videos of IDF soldiers cavorting with children's toys and women's underwear in the ruins of Gaza.

Western governments have gone out of their way not merely to support Israel's military actions but to provide it with every possible excuse to step back over the line: to be applauded for restoring a status quo ante bellum in which Gaza was already a concentration camp, blockaded and rationed to punish the Palestinians as a people. Keir Starmer's pompous conditionality is simply a route that Netanyahu can take, with minimal inconvenience, to ensure that the recognition of Palestinian statehood is once more deferred and Israel reaffirmed in the community of the Western powers. In reality, the momentum of events and the wider anger in Europe may see the UK isolated in September, perhaps only lining up alongside Germany, a country whose Staatsräson requires that it expiate its guilt over the Holocaust by giving Israel carte blanche (the embargo on arms that "could be used in Gaza" is obviously little more than a gesture).

But is it possible to step back over that line? It clearly wasn't in the case of Eichmann and Höss. You can't simply say "Sorry, we went too far" after committing a deliberate genocide. Robin quotes the academic Lihi Ben Shitrit: "As psychologists note, shame and guilt are similar and often appear together, but there are crucial differences. Feeling shame is associated with embarrassment over the actions of members of our group that we think negatively reflect on our group’s identity. Guilt occurs when we feel collective responsibility for the negative actions of our group members. Shame leads to avoidance — hiding, denying or looking away from such actions. Guilt, on the other hand, motivates reparative or restorative responses. Liberal Jews like myself need to overcome our shame, which pushes some of us to avoid or even deny the reality of Gaza. Instead, we must grapple with guilt; guilt not in the sense of personal culpability, but rather in our collective responsibility."

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian provides an object example of that liberal avoidance, even going so far as to claim a "moral case for escapism", and thus superior virtue: "For it’s when we feel ourselves plunged into the abyss, when our despair at our fellow human beings pulls strongest, that we most need to look upward – and glimpse the stars." What Freedland is implicitly saying is that his shame will never become guilt, in Ben Shitrit's terms. In other words he will neither question the existence of the State of Israel, like Avrum Burg, nor concede that collective responsibility means that Western governments, complacement liberal media and Israeli society generally must be deemed as guilty as Netanyahu, Smotrich and Gvir. As with the reaction to Eichmann in Jerusalem, it is that second charge, of collective responsibility, that sticks in his craw.

Conditionality

The two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict remains a polite fiction, urged mostly by European governments that have no intention of taking active steps to implement it. The US long ago gave up on even the fiction, preferring to make clear its support for a maximalist policy by Israel. The decision to bomb Iran in June was an endorsement of its client state's insistence that its area of authority is all of the Middle East, with only Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (currently) off-limits. So long as Israel remains America's regional proxy, which it will do regardless of who is in the White House, there is no possibility of its territorial integrity being called into question by a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians. That the fiction of the two-state solution is once more in the news does not indicate some tectonic shift in the geopolitical plates, despite the breathless coverage in the media. The proposed recognition of a Palestinian state in September by France, the UK and others is merely the latest attempt to preserve the fiction with the minimum of effort and consequence.

The conditions outlined by Keir Starmer are obviously intended to give himself sufficient room for manoeuvre to once more renege on a promise, even if Isarel truculently refuses to oblige by agreeing to even a temporary ceasefire. But they are also intended to revive the value of the "card" of formal recognition, and thus of the two-state solution itself, after years in which it has dwindled to almost nothing. To switch metaphors, by solemnly reviving the carrot as the centrepiece of his strategy he hopes to avoid questions over why the UK government has not thought fit to deploy the sticks of sanctions and arms embargoes in the face of what even centrist commentators are now admitting amounts to genocide. I have no idea whether Starmer will find himself obliged to recognise a Palestinian state in September, or whether he will find a way of wriggling out of it (the absurd conditions laid on Hamas - disband, have no future role etc - might well do the trick), but I do know that his decision will amount to little either way so long as the material and political support that the UK offers to Israel continues.

Patrick Wintour in the Guardian referred to the emerging division "between the moderate and extremist visions for the future of Gaza and the West Bank once the war finally ends." But he immediately emphasised that the former is premised on the Palestinians submitting to foreign interference - "a radically reformed Palestinian Authority governing without Hamas" - which makes clear that what will be recognised is closer to the pre-1948 British mandate than an independent people. Critics who insisted that the right of statehood cannot be qualified were forgetting that such qualifications were central to the operation of British imperialism during the twentieth century and it appears that muscle memory has kicked in, even though the UK simply doesn't have the power to impose its will in the way it did 100 years ago. This is why Starmer's conditions have a slightly ridiculous air of pomposity about them: I found myself hearing the voice of Neville Chamberlain talking about having sent the German Chancellor a "final note" as the current Prime Minister stood at the lectern. 

The conference in New York this week, hosted jointly by France and Saudi Arabia, employed similar language, insisting that "a transitional administrative committee must be immediately established to operate in Gaza under the umbrella of the Palestinian Authority". Given the corruption of the PA, this simply looks like a change of jailers for the people of Gaza and the West Bank. What is singularly lacking is any reference to the 1967 borders, which can be the only viable basis for a territorial settlement. According to Wintour, "The reality is that Israel in the wake of 7 October has moved further and further away from notions of a two-state solution." In fact, Israel had been steadily moving away from the idea since before the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Illegal settlements have been created with state support since 1967. Indeed, you could argue that the Accords lasting influence was to confirm that Israel had no interest in an equitable peace, seeing Palestine as "less than a state", in Rabin's words, and the Palestinian Authority as mere collaborators.

For Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian's chief apologist for Israel, the problem remains Netanyahu ("Steadily, the Israeli public is coming to see the price of the pariah status that Netanyahu has all but cultivated.") If world opinion has (reluctantly) concluded that Israel has crossed a line, there is no recognition by Freedland that the actions of the government are a faithful reflection of the society that elected it. But while he ignores the reality of Israel he is happy to recyle Number 10's crude interpretation of Hamas: "That group is not interested, they say, in a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, living alongside Israel. Hamas is not in the two-state business, but rather seeks to rule over a single, jihadist state across the entire land, from the river to the sea." Freedland's understanding of the region, which accurately reflects British centrist opinion, is premised on the myth that most Israelis are liberal and secular, and that most Palestinians are religious fundamentalists who wish to wipe Israel off the map. It is this idea that informs the "moderate vision" that Wintour speaks of. 

Implicit in this vision are a number of assumptions: that the Palestinians must be actively policed to guarantee Israel's security (and not vice versa); that the Palestinian Authority must be answerable to Israel and the international community, rather than just the Palestinian people; and that Palestine must be "less than a state", lacking such accoutrements as an army or an independent foreign policy. It is a mindset that reflects the persistence of colonial thinking among Western governments in which certain peoples are deemed unfit for self-rule. Genocide never occurs out of the blue. It arises against a background narrative in which an entire "other" people is seen as a threat that must be expunged to guarantee the security of the nation. And in the context of Israel-Palestine, it is the "moderate" vision as much as the extremist that is responsible for that narrative. This was a genocide long-foretold because it is a narrative we have long been conditioned to.